A version of this article is scheduled to appear in the May issue of Socialist Actionnewspaper. For a
one-year subscription, send $8 to Socialist Action, 298 Valencia St., San Francisco,
California94103.

For the Russian revolutionaries
of 100 years ago, the 1905 revolution was a rich learning experience. Years
later, Lenin referred to 1905 as the “dress rehearsal for the October
Revolution” of 1917. And while it was not a dress rehearsal in the sense that
1917 exactly replayed 1905, it was a dress rehearsal in the sense that the
Marxist revolutionaries learned an enormous amount, developed their political
theory and organizing skills, and emerged as a distinct and potent political
current. Even a little study of the history of the 1905 revolution yields
enormous benefits to serious activists one hundred years later.

The 1905 revolution actually
lasted three years. Starting in late 1904, it exploded in January of 1905,
reaching a high point
in October, November, and December of that year. In 1906 and 1907 a
counterrevolution took place, including trial and imprisonment of activists,
closing of newspapers and unions, and assassinations. The revolution can be
considered to have been thoroughly defeated by mid-1907 when the second Duma
(the Russian parliament established as a concession to the revolution) was
dissolved.

Leon Trotsky was an active
participant in the 1905 revolution and main leader of the unique organization
that emerged out of the revolution—the St. Petersburg Soviet, or workers
council. He also wrote one of the first histories of the revolution, still probably
the best. (The book was first published in German in 1909, when Trotsky was in exile
in Vienna, although it contains material he was writing, and speeches he was
making, in the thick of the events.) Trotsky’s 1905 is both a scholarly history of the events of that year and a
dramatic first-person account. What is more, Trotsky’s book is a political
summing-up of the revolution that contains many lessons for serious
revolutionaries.

1.

“On the other hand, the logic of the class struggle does not exempt us
from the necessity of using our own logic. Whoever is unable to admit
initiative, talent, energy, and heroism into the framework of historical
necessity, has not grasped the philosophical secret of Marxism. But conversely,
if we want to grasp a political process—in this case, the revolution—as a
whole, we must be capable of seeing, behind the motley of parties and programs,
behind the perfidy and greed of some and the courage and idealism of others,
the proper outlines of the social classes whose roots lie deep within the
relations of production and whose flowers blossom in the highest spheres of
ideology” (p. 37; all quotes are from the 1971 Vintage edition of Trotsky’s
1905).

Trotsky begins 1905 with four chapters on the history
of Russia, including a
history of the tsarist autocracy (the Russian monarchy headed by the Romanov
dynasty), a history of capitalist development in Russia, a history of the peasantry
and the agrarian question, and a chapter on the driving forces of the
revolution. Above all, these chapters show how Trotsky and other Social
Democrats (the name at the time of the party of revolutionary Marxists)
grounded their politics in an analysis of the reality of their country.

Trotsky then turns in the fifth
chapter to the events of the last four months of 1904, when the revolution
really started. In response to a severe military defeat at the hands of Japan
in early 1904 and the negative effects that the Russo-Japanese war had on the
economy, criticism of rule by the tsar increased. In response, Tsar Nicholas II
made several minor political concessions, which slightly opened the political
system. A wave of protest then poured forth. Much of this protest was initiated
by liberals, who convened a zemstvo congress in early November 1904. The
congress adopted a 10-point program calling for cosmetic changes in the autocratic
system of rule in Russia—but
it dared not even call for a constitution or an elected parliament. The
congress also initiated a banquet campaign that started on November 5, 1904, and ended on January 8, 1905. (For a
number of details in this review I have relied on Ascher’s history of the 1905
revolution. While Trotsky supplies many facts and details, he wrote his book
for an audience that was much more familiar with events than we are today. Consequently,
the reader of Trotsky’s classic needs to acquire some background on the
revolution from other sources.) The banquet campaign consisted of dinners or
banquets in which the attendees passed resolutions or drafted petitions that
were sent to Tsar Nicholas. Because these were “private dinners” and not political
meetings, the participants circumvented government control. The campaign
generated an enormous outpouring of criticism against the government. Most of
the dinners included speeches on the need for reform in the autocracy, so they
were also educational events.

2.

“…the course of the class struggle is not determined by political
ideology” (p. 190).

The banquet campaign ultimately
led nowhere. It was replaced and overshadowed by an event that precipitated the
revolutionary upheaval of 1905—January
9, 1905, known immediately afterward and forever as Bloody Sunday. The
events leading up to Bloody Sunday have a curious history.

While the ineffective liberal
campaign was bumbling on, growing opposition was building in the working class.
In the summer of 1903 in St. Petersburg
a bizarre figure, a priest named Father Gapon (with encouragement from the
tsarist police), had established an organization called the Assembly of the
Russian Factory and Mill Workers. It was meant to be a “peaceful” workers
organization, instead of the radical kind being organized illegally by
socialists. By January 1905, the Assembly had between 6,000 and 20,000 members.
The Assembly organized social and educational events for workers. Further, it
was a “police union,” an officially sponsored union under the control of the
authorities. Gapon himself received a monthly subsidy of 100 rubles (a large
sum of money at the time) from the police. Gapon was intelligent, handsome,
articulate, and cunning. He had little political understanding and was primarily
motivated by personal ambition. His dedication to himself far exceeded his
dedication to the people he sought to organize. He was constantly maneuvering between
the workers and the police officials in an effort to increase his own power.

On January 3 workers at one
factory in St. Petersburg
went on strike. The strike spread rapidly, reflecting the widespread
dissatisfaction in the working class. By January 7 between 100,000 and 140,000
workers (between two-thirds and half of the industrial workforce) in St. Petersburg had gone
out on strike. Gapon seized on the opportunity—he immediately supported the
strike and organized a demonstration for Sunday, January 9. Thus, unwittingly,
the police-sponsored union became a vehicle for genuine working class protest.
The demonstrators were to present a petition to the tsar. The petition, drafted
by groups of workers, contained a number of political demands, including calls
for democracy, the right to strike, and the eight-hour day.

Approximately 100,000 people
gathered for the peaceful demonstration, including many women and children, on
the morning of January 9. As they approached the WinterPalace,
they were ordered to disperse. Because of the size of the crowd, most could not
hear the order. The troops of the St.
Petersburg garrison, which had been reinforced in
anticipation of the demonstration, were ordered to open fire. Over 130 people
were killed and around 300 seriously injured.

The workers were enraged. On
the day after Bloody Sunday the strike continued in St. Petersburg and spread throughout the
empire to all major industrial centers. Trotsky counted strikes in 122
localities, a number of mines, and 10 railways. In all, between 500,000 and 1
million workers went on strike during January 1905. The strikes did not last
long. By the end of January the strike wave had subsided somewhat—but the
revolution had started.

Gapon escaped the country and
essentially ceased to be a political actor in the unfolding drama. (He was
assassinated in 1906 by Socialist Revolutionaries—the order came from the head
of the SR combat organization, who in fact was a police agent.)The Social Democrats (both Bolsheviks and
Mensheviks) had played little part in the banquet campaign of the liberals or in
the unexpected January 9 demonstration. Now the Marxist socialists threw
themselves into organizing unions and strikes, and agitating for democratic
reform. Many of the workers’ strikes were political, that is, they were not
focused on immediate workplace demands, but on political demands such as the
right to strike, freedom for workers arrested since the start of January, the
eight-hour day, and political democracy. The strikes were at first spontaneous
and unorganized, but soon, under the leadership of Social Democrats and
Socialists Revolutionaries, they became well organized and disciplined.

While the socialists were
organizing the working class and making radical demands against the monarchy
and against the interests of the capitalists, the liberals launched another
petition drive between February and July of 1905 in response to Tsar Nicholas’s
call for ideas on how to improve the empire (an effort to derail the revolution
with “dialogue,” and the liberals were happy to join in the attempted
derailment). Petitions flooded the capital, with a variety of political
demands. Meanwhile, the country had moved to the left, and revolution was in
the air.

Just as the revolution had
started in earnest, so had the counterrevolution. Shortly after Bloody Sunday an
organization called the Black Hundreds appeared in many cities and towns. The
Black Hundreds strongly defended the Romanov monarchy and, as a kind of
proto-fascist movement, engaged in violence, killing and beating workers,
peasants, Jews, and anyone suspected of supporting reform. They were
essentially death squads organized by wealthy right-wing Russians, although
they also had close ties to local government and police forces. How high up the
government hierarchy the organization of the Black Hundreds went is still not
clear. What is clear is that the government always looked the other way when
the Black Hundreds were committing their terrorist actions, and that local
police and troops often joined them. In addition to the Black Hundreds, the
government’s police and military forces carried out massive direct political
repression against strikers and protesters.

3.

“In struggle it is extremely important to weaken the enemy. That is what
a strike does. At the same time a strike brings the army of the revolution to
its feet. But neither the one nor the other, in itself, creates a state of
revolution.”

“The
power still has to be snatched from the hands of the old rulers and handed over
to the revolution. That is the fundamental task. A general strike only creates
the necessary preconditions; it is quite inadequate for achieving the task
itself” (p. 102).

The revolution that had been
simmering during the spring and summer boiled in the fall. The universities
opened their doors to political meetings. A meeting-mania swept through the
major universities. The meetings were attended by women and men workers,
secondary school students,and
university students. The attendees listened to political talks and debated
political programs and tactics.

On September 19 typesetters in Moscow struck demanding a
shorter work day and to be paid a higher piecework rate—including being paid
for punctuation marks. The strike quickly spread to other print shops in Moscow, then to other
industries. The strike appeared to be dying out on October 1. The next day the St. Petersburg typesetters
went out on a three-day sympathy strike. Sympathy strikes were also staged in
other areas of the empire, but all the strikes were petering out by October 5. But
in revolution, appearances are deceptive. The rail workers in Moscow called for a general strike on October
7. The next day, rail workers around the country moved to form a national union.And the day after that, the new union
formalized and publicized their strike demands: an eight-hour day, civil
liberties, amnesty for all political prisoners, and a constituent assembly to
write a democratic constitution. The strike spread through the entire empire,
bringing the economy to a halt. The government unleashed its harshest campaign
of political repression up to that time. The revolutionary mass strike was born
and the working class, through the Soviets, was clearly leading the revolution.

Since repression against the
strike did not seem to be succeeding, on October 17 the government issued a
manifesto outlining reforms planned for the coming months, including an elected
parliament, or Duma. Political parties of all persuasions were now organized or
came out from the underground. The liberals’ party was known as the Cadets (an
abbreviation for Constitutional Democrats). They viewed October 17 as a victory
and started to negotiate with the tsar, but they were not in control of events.
The working class, led by socialists, was in control.

4.

“The Soviet organized the working masses, directed the political
strikes and demonstrations, armed the workers, and protected the population
against pogroms. …The secret of this influence lay in the fact that the Soviet
grew as the natural organ of the proletariat in its immediate struggle for
power as determined by the actual course of events” (p. 251).

On October 13 a strike
committee, made up of about 40 “deputies,” or representatives who had been
elected by workers in St. Petersburg,
was formed. The committee, initially a product of work by serious activists
from the Menshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party, called on all factories
in the city to elect deputies, one deputy for every 500 workers. On October 17,
the Soviet of Workers Deputies elected an executive committee of fifty people.
The executive committee, in which Leon Trotsky and his co-thinkers played the
key role from the beginning, made the day-to-day decisions for the Soviet. Major
questions were debated and voted on by the whole Soviet. The first officially
elected chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet was G.S. Khrustalev-Nosar, but
the moving spirit and main author of the Soviet’s directives and resolutions
was Trotsky.

By the end of October, the St.
Petersburg Soviet had taken over many of the functions of the local government,
in addition to coordinating the general strike. Soviets of Workers’ Deputies
were also elected in as many as 50 other major cities of the Russian empire;
Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies and of Soldiers’ Deputies were also formed. A
situation of dual power developed—two governments were seeking to rule Russia.
One was the monarchy supported by the wealthy landlords and capitalists; the
other was the Soviets, supported by the workers and peasants. A clash was
inevitable

The fifty days from October 13,
when the St. Petersburg Soviet was established, until December 3, when a
meeting of the St. Petersburg Soviet was arrested by government troops, were known
as the “Days of Liberty.” The Soviets organized the nationwide general strike
and set up soup kitchens for the hungry and unemployed. They instituted freedom
of the press and protected people from pogroms and the Black Hundreds. Finally,
on October 31 the St. Petersburg Soviet declared that the eight-hour day was to
be instituted in all factories by revolutionary methods (strikes and walkouts).

Strikes occurred repeatedly
through October, November, and December. Peasant uprisings—occupations of
landed estates and destruction of the manor houses of the nobility—took place
in thousands of villages. In the military, several insurrections took place,
pitting one part of the military against another. Perhaps the most important
military uprising occurred on November 11 in Sevastopol
on the Black Sea, where a major revolt
occurred in the Russian Fleet, made famous by the mutiny on the Battleship
Potemkin. The government reacted with greater and greater violence. On November
26 Cossacks surrounded the building where the St. Petersburg Soviet was meeting
and arrested Khrustalev-Nosar along with several other deputies. The Soviet
immediately elected a new three-person presidium. At that point Trotsky
officially became chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet. The government started
to attack newspapers and arrest editors. The Soviets in various parts of the
empire started to prepare for an armed insurrection against the government. Then,
as we have said, on December 3 the military surrounded the building where the
St. Petersburg Soviet was meeting of the Soviet and arrested everyone.

One important point: on the day before the St. Petersburg Soviet of
1905 was suppressed, it passed a resolution repudiating the country’s foreign
debt. It declared, “The autocracy never enjoyed the confidence of the people
and was never granted any authority by the people. We have therefore decided
not to allow repayment of loans incurred by the tsarist government…” The
response of the French capitalists three months later was to loan the tsarist
government another three-quarter million francs. British and French capital
were only the two largest sources of blood-sucking investment in Russia
by the capitalists of the wealthier countries.

A dozen years later, in
February 1918, after the victory of the working class revolution in November
1917, the Soviet government canceled all of Russia’s debts to foreign banks and
investors. Revolutionary Russia
never repaid those debts. As Trotsky said, the bankers “were warned in ample
time.”

Almost every country in the
“developing” world today—burdened by debts, usually contracted by corrupt and
dictatorial neo-colonial regimes at the expense of the impoverished majority—could
benefit by following the example set by the Russian workers of 1905 and 1917.

Then came armed insurrection in
Moscow in
December 1905.

From the onset of the general
strike in October, St. Petersburg
was the center of the revolution. The center now shifted to Moscow. The Moscow Soviet had formed much
later than the one in St. Petersburg,
finally getting organized in mid-November. The Soviet in Moscow was dominated by Bolsheviks. After
holding a series of open public meetings to discuss tactics, the Moscow Soviet called
for a general strike to begin on December 7. The Soviet also began preparations
for an armed uprising. The strike paralyzed the city and tensions mounted. On
December 9 the army surrounded a meeting of some 600 people (100 of whom had
small arms). After waiting 2 hours, the military stormed the building, using
heavy artillery to destroy much of it. The strikers, massively outnumbered,
surrendered. The military continued shooting them after they had been captured
(the same kind of thing we have seen in the recent suppression of Falluja).

An urban guerrilla war now
broke out, with small groups of workers firing small arms at heavily armed
troops with artillery. The troops shelled any building from which a shot was
fired and fired upon any group of three or more civilians. (Again, the same
methods being used in Iraq.)Finally, on December 16 the military
surrounded the working class district of Krasnaya Presnya and after intensive
shelling from 16 heavy artillery pieces, the troops started a brutal slaughter
of both combatants and noncombatants. Thousands of workers were killed (about
25% of those killed were women and children). For all intents and purposes, the
revolution had been defeated. The government immediately started executing people
without trial, interrogating and arresting workers and students, and torturing
and imprisoning anyone they suspected of political activism.

5.

“The preconditions for revolutionary victory are forged in the historic
school of harsh conflicts and cruel defeats” (p. 56).

Trotsky and the other leaders
of the Soviet were tried after months in prison. Trotsky spent his time in
prison studying, writing essays, and preparing his book about the revolution. On
September 19, 1906,
Trotsky and the others were brought into court. His speech before the court,
defending the Soviet and the revolution became widely popular among the masses
of workers. Afterwards, Trotsky was sentenced to internal exile, from which he
escaped. (His dramatic account of this is included toward the end of his book 1905.) While Trotsky was in prison
elections for the first Duma were held from the end of February to mid-April
1906. The first Duma was dominated by the liberal Cadets, because most of the
left parties boycotted the elections. The first Duma accomplished little and
was soon dissolved by Tsar Nicholas, who called for new elections (with a more
restricted voting system). The second Duma convened on February 20, 1907. Despite a number
of efforts to ensure victories for conservative candidates, the second Duma was
more radical than the first, with a substantial representation of left parties,
who decided not to boycott the elections the second time around. A struggle
between the Duma and Nicholas Romanov’s autocratic regime continued for several
more months until the tsar dissolved the second Duma on June 3, 1907, arresting many of the
deputies. This marked the final end of the first Russian revolution.

All of the left forces in the
revolution, including both wings of the Social Democrats (the Bolsheviks and
the Mensheviks) and the Socialist Revolutionaries, made mistakes. But they also
did many things well and learned very quickly. One of the first lessons was the
importance of the political mass strike and the formation of workers councils
(Soviets) as instruments not of a single political party or union but as
representative bodies of the entire class. This lesson was communicated in a
number of ways by several revolutionaries, the two most important being Trotsky
himself (in his book 1905 and other
writings from the period) and Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg published The MassStrike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions in 1906, shortly
after the revolutionary events described by Trotsky. Her goal was to
communicate the political lessons of the Russian Revolution to Marxists in Germany
and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

A second lesson of the
revolution took longer to be assimilated by the Social Democrats because it
went against one of their fundamental assumptions about revolution in a
“backward” country such as Russia (while backward, it was the seventh most
industrialized country in the world at the time, as measured by industrial
output). That lesson was expressed in Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution.
While this theory was developed and presented by Trotsky and his
co-revolutionist Parvus during the early days of the revolution, Trotsky’s
first full statement of the theory was published in 1906 in his work Results and Prospects. Up to 1905, most
Marxist revolutionaries in Russia
believed they were fighting for democratic government under a capitalist
economy; in other words, they thought of themselves as fighting for a bourgeois
revolution against the strong surviving elements of feudal landlordism still
prevalent in Russia.
Later, after the economy had developed under capitalism, they would struggle
for a socialist revolution. Trotsky’s genius was to realize that the historical
development of social classes and capitalism in Russia had in fact been different,
that an anti-feudal, anti-monarchical, democratic revolution would not be led
by capitalists—because the capitalists were linked with the feudal landlords
and the monarchy and feared the newly emergent working class and the rebellious
peasantry. It turned out that the necessary measures to modernize Russia,
which socialists had expected the capitalists to carry out through a “bourgeois
democratic” revolution, could only be achieved by the working class taking
power. But once in power, the workers would carry out not only democratic
measures to free their peasant allies from feudal landlordism, and free all of Russia
from monarchical rule, but also socialist, anti-capitalist measures to meet the
needs and interests of the working class.

Of course, Trotsky (and later
Lenin and the majority of Bolsheviks who adopted Trotsky’s perspective and went
on to carry out a combined “bourgeois-democratic” and socialist revolution in Russia in 1917) realized that the revolution
would not survive and succeed unless it spread to Europe, forming a United
Socialist States of Europe and Russia.

One hundred years after the
1905 revolution, there is much that serious activists in North
America can learn from that history. Assimilating the history of
the first Russian revolution (and of other revolutions and struggles for social
justice) will help us create our own revolution. Trotsky and Lenin, and many of
the other revolutionaries of the time, knew that it was harder to make a
revolution in an advanced capitalist country, such as Germany or the U.S.,
than it was in a backward capitalist country, such as Russia or China. There is much we need to
learn because there is so very much that we need to do. Trotsky gave us a
model; he simultaneously learned by doing and learned while doing.

Works Cited in this Review

1905 by Leon Trotsky. New
York: Vintage Books, 1971. Originally drafted during
and immediately after the revolution, this book was completed in Vienna in 1908–1909 and published in Germany in 1909; the Vintage
edition is the only available translation in English. While it is out of print,
you can still find copies at some libraries, radical bookstores, and on the web
at www.amazon.com. In addition to the
preface to the German edition and to the first and second English editions (all
written by Trotsky), the Vintage edition contains four “annexes” with political
articles that Trotsky wrote on the revolution, descriptions of the trial of the
Soviet deputies and Trotsky’s speech to the court, excerpts from letters he
wrote in exile, and his account of escape from exile.

The Revolution of 1905: A Short History by Abraham Ascher. Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 2004. This is a
condensed version of Ascher’s larger, two-volume work on the 1905 revolution. The
book has a strong narrative and is fact-filled. Ascher is a liberal, who thinks
that both sides were at fault during the revolution of 1905. If only everyone
had been more reasonable, he implies, Russia could have established a
liberal democracy in 1905 and avoided the “nasty” revolution of 1917. In
Ascher’s book there is a perverse capitalist morality (the workers were being “unreasonable”
because they wanted an eight-hour day, the right to vote, freedom of the press,
equality for all citizens including women, Jews, and non-Russian national
minorities, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and execution, while the
autocracy wanted to continue to treat people like slaves and to repress with
military force and death squads any attempts to change the system). Aside from
that fundamental weakness, the book can be informative and useful as a
supplement to Trotsky’s account.

The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions, by Rosa
Luxemburg. New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1971. Originally published in German in 1906 and first
published in English in 1925,the work
is no longer in print, but like 1905 can occasionally be found at libraries,
progressive bookstores, and at www.amazon.com.
The Harper Torchbooks edition also contains the Junius Pamphlet, another of
Luxemburg’s important short works.

The Permanent Revolution, and Results and Prospects by Leon
Trotsky. New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1969. The Pathfinder edition, available at some progressive
bookstores, libraries, and at www.amazon.com,
contains Results and Prospects, which
was originally published in 1906 and was the first full exposition of the
theory of permanent revolution that had guided Trotsky’s actions during the 1905
revolution and been refined as a result of the experience. The Permanent Revolution is a longer work, written in the late
1920s, defending the theory from attacks on it by Stalin and his associates in
the Soviet bureaucracy.

See also Trotsky’s chapters on
the 1905 revolution in his autobiography My
Life, as well as his discussion of the theory of permanent revolution in
the remaining chapters of that work; also, Trotsky’s “Three Conceptions of the
Russian Revolution,” in Writings of Leon
Trotsky, 1939–40.